


They Passed Down All the Roads Long Ago

by basicgrace



Category: Marvel
Genre: Gen, Natasha Romanov-centric, Red Room (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26719195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basicgrace/pseuds/basicgrace
Summary: A handful of ficlets about how Natasha carries the Red Room with her wherever she goes. Black Widow was meant to be a class of agent and instead there is Natasha.Ch 1: Can she really be the last? Where are her sisters now?Ch 2: How much does Natasha love her sisters? How much does she miss them?
Kudos: 14





	1. Radio Nowhere

There are no anniversaries to bring Natasha to her knees. Most of her worst days were in the Red Room, and they never knew the day or month there. Instead her body remembers the weather, how the wind and humidity and temperature had felt against her skin. Usually New York's weather is far enough from the Russian winters and summers of her childhood to keep her safe, but sometimes a certain nip in the air reminds her vividly of a neat classroom, a spick-and-span dormitory, a filthy training field. When her life was less stable, she would have made herself push through those days, going about her regular business because any day off, any weakness, was a risk, but these days she just holes up in the tower until the sky changes and the air shifts. She can afford to wait out her memories these days. 

The nebulousness of time in the Red Room means she's also never quite sure how long it's been. Has it been twenty years since she saw one of her sisters, or twenty-three? Does it matter? She will never see any of them again. Even after she defected to SHIELD, she refused to look for them. If they're dead, she doesn't want to know. If they're alive, she doesn't want to know. Are they still killing in the name of Mother Russia over there, supporting the cause they'd all been raised with? Are they criminals now, or socialites, or reduced to trophy wives like the outer layer of a babushka doll put back together without the inner layers inside? Or is she really, truly the last of them, outliving them all in this high castle tower in a land they were all raised to hate? 

Oh, if they could see her now. Covers blown, webs slashed, with her name and face all over the news. Her teachers would be appalled to see her acting like a street tough, a hired brawler, instead of working from the shadows as she was meant. After that first huge, awful battle with the aliens, and then again after she blew SHIELD wide open on the internet, some secret, smothered part of her hoped that her sisters would come calling. Before, she would never have dared leave trails that led to her, not with the dangerous life she lived, but now that decision had been made for her and surely there was nowhere in the world that did not know of her now. Surely even one of them would cross the ocean to find their Natalia so far from home and she would be grateful for whichever one it was, even if it was one of the sisters she had liked the least. But none came, and so the little ember of hope flickered on, irrepressible.

Every few years the search tempts her again. To an intelligence agent of her caliber, how hard would it be to track down all those threads leading away from the Red Room where they were raised? But it would swallow her up, she would drown in it, she knows she would. Sometimes the air feels too thick to breathe and her lungs won't take it in and oxygen doesn't fill her up and it makes her want to fill the bathtub with water and stick her face under because maybe water would be easier to breathe than this. Maybe if she could just get underwater she would be able to breathe. 

Clint offered to look for her once. He's just as good as she is, good enough to compensate for not having the wealth of knowledge and connections to the Russian underworld that she does. But he doesn't know the exact way her sisters inflect their words, the shape of their eyes, the way they move. She spent over a decade of her life with hardly anyone to look at or talk to than those girls, and sometimes it feels like they're written on her bones. She could pick any one of her sisters out of a crowd of thousands, given the right vantage point. She knows how they search and hide, disguise themselves and lay their traps. No one will ever be able to find them like she could, but she won't find them. They don't need her disrupting what lives they've managed to build for themselves. She doesn't need to stand over each icy grave, fighting the urge to dig it up just to make sure it's the real thing. 

On the days she trusts her memory the least, she wonders if she even had sisters, and imagines herself dancing in a studio with too many mirrors, reflecting over and over until the room is full of just one little girl, going through the motions alone.


	2. Put It This Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How much does Natasha love her sisters? How much does she miss them?

Put it this way: some days Natasha would rather put on another halo and see the light again than go one more day without seeing even one of her sisters. 

Put it this way: some days Natasha sacrifices her hyperawareness for the luxury of letting herself remember their voices, knowing that she'll spend the rest of the week hearing their advice over imaginary coms.

Put it this way: Natasha has spent more of her life sleeping in hotels and safe houses, bunkers and barracks, than she has sleeping in those dorms and she still misses the sound of two dozen girls breathing out of sync.

Put it this way: their ghosts bump and jostle around her in the way her careful, scared, somber flesh-and-bone sisters never did. She carries them in her veins, the blood they swapped and mixed and spilled. She carries them in slight intonations, a handful of words in many languages. She does not know how she has lived so long with only hauntings. She does not know where she could lay these ghosts to rest, or if she could bear to. So much of her is made of bits of them

She has grown into a person with preferences and feelings and she fears that her self will grow so large that it will smother the crumbs of theirs she has left. The crumbs are paltry, the crumbs are everything. What is the point of her survival if she does not live for all of them, try the things they wanted to try, have the indulgences they wanted to have? She eats her favorite foods with sides of theirs, visits the cities she wanted to see and chooses the detours they would have chosen.

Put it this way: Natasha will expect them to be there when she turns around for the rest of her life.

Put it this way: they are her past and her future, her life and her death, her beginning and her end. She would warp time and space to make an afterlife to find them in.

Put it this way: some days Natasha would rather be back with their old puppet masters than let the memories of her sisters fade any further.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway fuck me up about how Natasha must've loved and hated those girls she was raised with who are now beyond both love and hate! Title and summary are references to The Last Unicorn


End file.
